This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the invention. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is prior art or what is not prior art.
Use of application level multicast (ALM) is common in collaborative applications where identical data streams are sent to different endpoints. For example, Microsoft® NetMeeting® is a peer-to-peer collaboration application that allows users to join a session and share windows, desktops, audio and video in an ALM. Based on which participants' IP addresses are called by later entrants when they join the session, NetMeeting® builds a tree for an ALM where either of the first two users in the session serves as the root of the tree. Typically, the user in the session receiving calls from later users becomes their parent in the ALM tree for distribution of multicast data. In the case where all subsequent users place a call to the first user to join a session, the ALM tree becomes a star.